20nm ARM-based chips to hit 3 GHz in 2014

http://liliputing.com/2013/07/20nm-arm-based-chips-to-hit-3-ghz-in-2014.html

Nobody responds to Intel's vaporware introductions very much any more, so after a week of a very few PC pundits saying that Intel is staging a come back with their 2ghz quad core 22nm chipsets and all that sort of stuff the two top dog ARM chip producers co-released a very simple statement.

Lithography size is now 18-20nm.  Processor speed per core to start at 2.8 ghz and to go up to 3.x (they haven't pushed it yet).   Energy use to drop 25% from where it is are now.   "Sea of cores" technology is built into the designs.   64 and 32 bit support is built in now (either per core, and you can do both at the same time on separate cores).   Linaro has released the supporting changes to the Linux kernel, implemented in 3.7 and updated twice already.

They also backed it with individual personal verbal statements that the new line's run offs have been completed and the production samples are in the hands of the various vendors since 1-2 months ago.  

ARM is referred to as being happy that "the speeds achieved slightly exceeded their predictions".   TSMC is suspected to be the culprit for that advance at a 18nm production size, which logically should do better than Global's 20nm production samples.   Both production lines are real and have been sampled and it is suspected are in production for somebody's top secret Christmas timeline surprise at this point in time.

As you read this, remember it refers to the A-53 and A-57 and the AMD 64 bit server chipset series which will all be the first things produced on these lines at 18-20nm.  These are the very first of the 64 bit ARM chipset designs.   The new 64bits will demand a premium price, while the old 28nm lines keep churning out existing designs at an ever lower cost.


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So, what will really happen?     Progress shall come along in little waves interspersed with much bigger waves.    Mobile and battery powered devices will continue to get replaced as they roll through upgrade periods and software based obsolescences.

My old white box will continue to run its old (and now very obsolete) Linux Mint 9.0 with no updates until either the monitor dies or the CPU box dies.


NEXT ITEM OF NOTE:    

ARM will soon release the designs of what comes after A-53 and A-57.    Look for more of a generic sea of cores approach with more attention paid to a VERY FAST, energy tight & physically very small littles --  with much less push on the bulky powerful energy sucking bigs that nobody seems to be actually using for very much right now.  

Look for the bigs to start to become a "compilation on die" of 4-8 littles with a much better on-die GPU chip.   Hard Macro designs will come out much more frequent and will be closely aimed at known niche needs in the current cell phone space.   Remember, ARM very much wants to keep Intel out at the sidelines where they can go play with Microsoft until they both become pretty much irrelevant.   If they leave holes or unmet needs -- Intel will get in.  

Intel will get faster off the bat and more nimble, they have to.

Why mostly littles?   Sea of cores technology at 64 bit can substitute in the little cores at will for the same processing power as could be supplied by some fewer number of big cores (but the much lower wafer yield rates and much greater complexity make the bigs too much more expensive to make, so more & more littles will start to rule completely).

I tried talking a retired IBM'r about all this. He was in sales, mostly S36 and bigger iron. Except for the ARM is basically the old RISC .. most of it went "swhoose" over his head.

I do hope Intel/ AMD have advanced plans. There are bonds out for railroads up to 2050... yeah they failed to realize they are in the transportation business.. not just rail.

Speak of that NASA and moon business..

I was wondering last year, imagine all the area in a space craft or even a commericial jet air liner covered dials, gauges, and switches. Now, replace all those .. ALL of them with touch screen technology. Each 2*2 gauge becomes an icon maybe .5"* .5" .. if its green its ok.. if its red, it needs attention.. press it and you get your 2*2' gauge.. and switches.  A summary panel stays up most of the time... really who needs to look at a gauge that is within system norms? Maybe a real-time graph.. showing not what IS... but what was and how its changed over time. Touchscreen fails...pfft . unplug it and pop in another. No need for redundant gauges... sensors maybe... but not gauges.  

I understand that the space shuttle had 11 on-board computers. The computers would take a "vote" .. a poll. Any one computer could "down-vote" a launch. Pretty cool way to do things... Eleven cell phones could do it now.

justin_o_guy2 wrote on 07/09/13 at 16:55:16:



Justin, my "new" phone is a Galaxy S3 built at the old 38 nanometer size and mine is actually an older dual core Snapdragon design to be more anal & precise about it.  It runs plenty good enough for me, anyway.

Same chip "footprint space" next year will hold a octa-core A53 with a much much better graphics core and a much higher definition screen.   Battery will last twice as long too.   A win-win-win for me all the way ....  

(Allwinner's trademarked trick, that)

Yup, it will all get a lot better by the time I am due to roll into a new cell phone.

If memory serves, those tablets were very much like a Nexus 7 in features, but only cost $149.

Here is what $140 (outright buy, no 2 year plan) will buy for you now in a quad core cell phone.
http://liliputing.com/2013/07/blu-dash-unlocked-quad-core-android-phone-for-1...


And for your curiosity and interest -- remember the Ubuntu phones that were making a stir several months ago (but it was all pie in the sky stuff, you using your cell phone in a docking station as your PC.)  

Sorta silly, wasn't it -- it could never work, huh?    

Lookie who is considering buying themselves into some sky pie ....   our old sim card-less buddies at Verizon.

Verizon can smell the coffee jest a coming up at them from the cheapie Chinese guys.   All the Chinese phones have a sim card slot or two  so they can be vendor locked/simmed and/or total memory bumped at will.



Verizon joins Ubuntu advisory group: Ubuntu Phone OS coming to America?

http://liliputing.com/2013/07/verizon-joins-ubuntu-advisory-group-ubuntu-phon...



The old cell phone world was used to using Steve Jobs as a spark plug to get the changes a'going -- now a certain South African space Shuttleworth traveler is looking to fill that empty cell phone world "change instigator" position.

Certainly his visionary Shuttleworth type changes will have a much better price tag on them than Job's changes used to have ....

Yup, that would be nice.   So would a cell phone that stored all your memory consuming stuff up in the cloud, that allowed you to shut off your data plan and operate strictly off of your normal high speed wifi access that you DO already have at home and at work so you could minimized your use of expensive data plan minutes.

These were "Shuttleworth type" open source dreamer dreams and they got actually built by a few open sourcer dreamers (they build a wifi phone) and the ideas got added to the Linux Kernel.  Their special wifi only phone didn't go anywhere for very much here in the USA, but the idea did work out well overseas.

Here is the real worth of Shuttleworth and the open source dreamers -- my Galaxy SIII which is a two-three year old design just pulled in an Android upgrade right before I bought mine on $100 sale at Verizon.   Guess what neat little trick my phone does natively with one click on a setup window click box?  

Yup, that wifi only access Shuttleworth dreamer's trick that the dreamers developed and proved out and got put into the kernel so ANYBODY can use it that wants to.  Including Samsung as it turns out.   Samsung calls it a "feature" and really, it is a "feature" to somebody who didn't know where it came from.

Yup, my daughter spotted the feature while she was perusing phone sites looking for the "best phone".   She realized a Verizon bottom end minimalistic family plan with only a minimal 2 gig of data plan minutes could be stretched way way way far using that trick.  So, she talked us all into getting Galaxy S3 phones so we could share this dreamer knowledge on how to get the phone to work for us well as most of our phone time and data swapping is still spent between Grandmama, Momma and Daughter (and the rest of the family, some of which have dropped Apple and learned the Galaxy S3 trick).

As default, we leave "plan data" turned off.  We turn "plan data" on when we are on the road or out of town, the rest of the time we run strictly off our local wifi access.   We still get updates, text, messages, voicemail, etc etc and I can't tell the difference in function between being on "wifi" and "on data plan".   Me, I am waiting for the feature to get smart, so you don't have to switch it on and off yourself manually.

We got us 5 people sharing one 2 gigabyte data minute basic low end family plan.   The plan has unlimited text and phone within the family plan group anyway, so that works out well for us.   Just remember to leave "data plan" turned off as a default condition.


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I likes them Shuttleworth open source dreamers, I do.   They have some really good ideas that they dream up.    The price is right on them dreams, too.

Microsoft and Apple, they don't have any dreams any more that don't have big assed dollar signs attached to them.   Shame that.


Low dollar dreams are what America needs more of right now.

Microsoft made the tech news pages again .....

Microsoft Surface RT gets a global price cut (was originally $1,200 now costs about $350)







Question becomes "Can they actually sell any in Europe at that price?"    Aren't the Europeans swift enough to figure out you plan on selling them the keyboard separately for about the same price yet again?

Second question becomes "How many American customers is this move going to hack off since you left the price way up high inside the USA ????"

Oh, so you think American consumers are that stupid and you are spending millions on ads saying your piece of shite Surface RT tablets are really great stuff so as to BS them??   And you think all the high school geeky boy kids are gonna have Mommy buy them one so pimply 'ol sonny boy can be in with them purty blond good lookin' in crowd girls and them "neat" boy toy kids that are shown in the MS Surface ads?

Get real, actual kids are wired in tight now days -- they are much much tougher to fool than their parents.

Every prepubescent  knows that the neat kids use 100% Apple products.   The not so neat kids use Nexus, Asus and Samsung products (in that order).

You think your young potential customers are stupid, or what?

Nobody but the geek squad use MS products, and who wants to be a boy geek and to always be getting their shorts yanked up all the time?


    Yheeeeeee !!!  Aieeee !!!    (drops tablet and clutches at his crotch)  
Ohmyballsohmyballsohmyballsohmyballstheyhurtsooobad .....


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Help !!!   Help !!!  Somebody let me out of my locker !!!   Please, please -- let me out !!!

Teach, them in-crowd boys have got my MS^R Surface RT and they are down in the atrium playing a game of hall hocky with it !!!

Thanks for the Utilite link, very interesting, seen some similar modules when a couple of gamers about ten years ago decided laptops were not capable of playing their games and pc's were to dang big to take with you on the bus/plane/boat, so they were building small boxes like these.
I looked at a lot of the present setups on the utilite site, but it looks like they don't come with hard drives just "slots" to add 2.5" disk drives and you still have to buy a monitor, keyboard and mouse to use them. A link on the Utilite site sends you to amazon for their current products and most of them are just as expensive as laptops are and you still have to buy keyboard/monitor/mouse, so pricewise these units are not budget friendly.....yet....
If their new Utilite unit comes with a 500 or 600 gig hard drive and not a blank slot, and still keeps the $99 price tag, I might get one to see what its all about because I still have a couple monitors and keyboards laying about.
Not trying to start a war mind you just taking in all the info being put out here in the net.
I recently bout a new laptop 17" hp pavilion/w 8gig ram, 500gig hd, amd quad-core A10, radeon graphics, with DVD installed (some don't have that feature with new windows) for only $578 at wallyworld. So far i'm happy with it.